Runway Vs. Real Girl: Bold Beauty Looks

Runway Vs. Real Girl: Bold Beauty Looks

When we're backstage at Fashion Week, one of the first questions we ask the hair and makeup pros is "Seriously though, is this really wearable for a real girl?" That's usually when the beauty expert will give the side-eye to a model — whose prepubescent face is invariably decked out in hot-pink eye makeup and a crazily teased bouffant — and start their answer off with a wary "Well..."

We know the looks are out there, but somehow when we see them in action on the runway, we can't help but think it might be something we want to try and recreate. It doesn't help that models, whose literal job it is to make crazy hair and makeup look good, always manage to convince us to drink the Kool-Aid and think that, why yes, we just might be able to pull off bleached brows and black lipstick.

We wanted to see what happened when you removed genetically gifted 15-year-olds from the equation — would the cray-cray hair and makeup still look covetable, or would it come across as just plain insane? So, we took two real girls and dolled them up in some of the most conceptual catwalk looks of the spring '13 shows — Marc Jacobs' artsy homage to Edie Sedgwick and Creatures of the Wind's hair net choker and metallic fuchsia eye sockets. Click through to see their haute couture transformations and tell us — can a real girl rock a runway look, or should we leave the abstract beauty expressionism to the catwalk experts?